TREASURE QUEST
Colonel Hamilcar Urgo was not addicted to introspection. He took
himself as he found himself and as a rule was well pleased with the
find. Had any non-partisan voice of conscience told him cruelty played
a large part in his make-up undoubtedly the little Colonel would
have denied the charge with hot indignation. Cruelty, to his way of
thinking, was exclusively a feminine defect; a woman was guilty of
cruelty, for example, when she spurned the honourable advances of so
honourable a suitor as Hamilcar Urgo. Benicia O’Donoju was the cruelest
creature he knew; wherefore like a fractious horse she must be broken.
No, Señor Urgo found nothing reprehensible in his orders to Ygnacio,
the Papago, that Don Padraic must be put out of the way. The same
impulse had prompted him to strip the bandage of ignorance from
Benicia’s eyes during that interview in the patio without the least
compunction. These headstrong women! There was a way to handle them
just as there was a way to break the heart of a high-spirited mount:
curb bits that tear and spurs that gouge. Let him have possession of a
spirit-broken woman for a little while, to play with and then discard;
possession was not nearly so diverting as the game of spirit breaking.
At that Urgo considered himself rather a master hand.
He had not hated the master of the Casa O’Donoju. Aside from the
necessity of clearing the field of a possible objector to his suit and
bringing pain to the haughty desert girl, Urgo’s murder impulse was
prompted by no personal bias. But with all the deadly spleen compacted
into his wispy body the little man hated the gringo Grant Hickman.
Hated him because the American was in the lists against him; hated him,
especially, because twice Hickman had humiliated him before the eyes of
Benicia: once in the Pullman out of El Paso and a second time--searing
scar in memory--when the man, though weakened by a bullet wound, had
hustled him out the door of the desert manor.
If whole-heartedness gives any palliation to hatred then was Hamilcar
Urgo’s passion almost to be forgiven him. For very dynamic force no
impulse in his twisted career matched it. The vision of this gringo’s
impudently smiling face went to bed with him at night and abided with
him all day--a veritable ache. Come what might, he would destroy Grant
Hickman and in a manner such as to entail the most refined tortures.
So this was his single purpose--possession of the girl would be a mere
by-product--when he used his power with the police arm of the Sonora
state government to assemble ten ruffians of the rurales force at a
point on the railroad within striking distance of the Road of the
Dead Men. Desert cars were at his disposal but he preferred to head a
mounted force because his plans looked to an excursion into country
where autos could not go, once Hickman was his prisoner. A complaisant
spirit of justice at Hermosillo would accept in lieu of the escaped
convict’s person some token symbolical of a justice already wrought
through the instrument of the state’s worthy servant, Urgo.
The day after the sand storm Urgo and his rurales set out from the
railroad for the west and the Garden of Solitude at the end of a long
road. They were superbly mounted; two pack animals trotted behind the
file of horsemen. Revolutions had been squelched by a less imposing
force.
After the cleansing storm the desert was bland and tolerant. Air clear
as quartz, sun tempered by fresh winds from the west, on every club and
spike of cactus fresh flowers born overnight to replace those destroyed
by the driving sands. One of the rurales unslung a guitar from a mule’s
pack and strummed minor chords to the accompaniment of a song in which
the rest joined. The ballad was gentle as a butterfly’s wing, telling
of roses over a lady-love’s window.
Urgo, lulled by the immensity of the desert peace, perhaps even by
the tenderness of the song his murderers sang, pleasured himself by
building pictures in prospect. He saw himself riding alone up to
the door of the Casa O’Donoju--the rurales would be disposed beyond
sight of the door but within call; saw the courteous bow he would
make to Señorita Benicia; heard himself inquiring in polite phrase
concerning her health and that of her respected father. Ah, Don Padraic
dead--murdered! Grace of God, but that was sad news. But the American
gentleman who was a guest at the Casa O’Donoju; did his unfortunate
wound still keep him under the beneficence of the casa’s hospitality--?
Five hours of the second day out on the Road of the Dead Men the rurale
who was riding at the head of the file reined in with a shout. His
arm stretched to point a tiny black beetle away off to the westward:
a beetle skittering down the long slope of a divide and in their
direction. In ten minutes the beetle showed again, but it had grown to
the dimensions of an auto. It was upon them almost before the horsemen
had spread themselves in a fan across the road. Quelele, whom Urgo
instantly recognized, accepted the implied hint to halt; in the seat
beside him was a strange white man--a gringo by his looks. This man
let a bland, incurious eye range over the band of horsemen until it
settled upon Urgo; there it rested with a dispassionate stare somehow
affronting to the Spaniard’s dignity.
Urgo stiffly bowed and waited for the gringo to speak. Instead of
returning his salutation the white man searched the pockets of his vest
for tobacco bag and papers and bent all his attention upon rolling a
cigarette.
“You have come from the Casa O’Donoju, señor?” Urgo asked in English.
Bim Bagley gave the clipped Spanish “Si” of assent and drew his rolled
cigarette across his lips with a languid air. Urgo in a growing rage
wondered if this boorishness were the stranger’s typically American
manner or assumed to provoke hostility. His voice was silken as he put
his next question in Spanish:
“The Señorita O’Donoju and Don Padraic, her father, they enjoy the best
health, I hope.”
“I hope so, too,” was Bim’s short reply as he put a match to his smoke.
Urgo’s brows knitted. Here was no boor but a wise gringo with a chuckle
behind every word.
“I am doing myself the honour to call upon Don Padraic and his charming
daughter,” his temper pushed him to volunteer. Bim swept the company of
horsemen with a lack-lustre eye and then let his glance return to the
dapper figure of the Colonel.
“Do tell,” he drawled in broadest Border dialect. “See you brought all
the boys with you. Well, so long!” He nudged the Indian a signal to
go ahead. Urgo would have liked to detain this impudent gringo for a
lesson in manners did not more pressing pleasure lie ahead. He gave an
imperceptible nod and the horsemen who blocked the road moved aside.
The little car shot back a pungent cloud of smoke for a parting insult
as it took the road in high. Urgo watched it rise to the low crest of
a divide and disappear. Insufferable gringo! What had he been doing at
Casa O’Donoju? What did he know of recent events there?
A shrug dismissed Bagley, and the file of horsemen resumed leisurely
progress along the desert road. A night’s dry camp, and early morning
would see them in the oasis green at journey’s end.
Colonel Urgo miscalculated when he dismissed Bim Bagley with a shrug.
Did the little Spaniard but know it, this meeting in the wastes was
the objective point in the gringo’s strategy. Even under certain heavy
handicaps ten gallons of gasoline in the desert can achieve more than
ten horses with rurales on their backs. It all depends upon the hand
that nurses precious jets of this gasoline across the path of the
spark. And Quelele’s was a master hand. Wherefore the second phase in
Bim’s strategy was entered upon.
Bim and the Indian had made perhaps five miles along the
eastward-bearing road beyond the point of the meeting with Urgo’s
ruffians when the Papago turned off the single wheel track and into
the sparse scrub. A low range separated them from the rurales; the
crumbling of that range into desert flatness lay a good ten miles to
southward. Once around that, the little car could be tooled behind a
screen of hillocks back onto the Road of the Dead Men and ahead of the
rurales, but only by exercise of the most delicate driving judgment.
“Smack through the country--without roads?” whiffles the incredulous
driver of limousines along sedate highways in Pennsylvania and New
York. Exactly that. It is done in Arizona and Sonora--thirty or fifty
miles of unfenced desert; compass to pick up direction and shovel to
dig out of arroyos. Johnny Cameron, of Ajo, even herds wild horses on a
motorcycle.
Quelele stopped to let air out of his tires that they might better
grip the sand and pad through soft places. Then began a jackrabbit
skittering and twisting ’cross country, with every hundred yards
offering the hazard of a broken axle and the little desert skimmer
standing on its nose at the brink of a dry wash while its passengers
flattened the descent by hasty shovel work. Like a rowboat in
mid-Atlantic the puny contraption of tin and steel took the long waves,
snarling and grumbling over sand-traps, boggling through thickets
of _cholla_ which rigged its tires with festoons of prickly stubs.
Quelele’s hands possessed magic. They knew just when to give a twist to
the wheel, when to shoot the spark ahead. Every hummock and pitfall was
read by them surely and swiftly.
The little car rounded the end of the mountain range and shot back on a
tangent for the road where Urgo and his rurales were travelling. With
a grunt Quelele suddenly let the car trundle to a halt; he clambered
out and knelt by the radiator. Drip-drip of precious water from some
stab of brush through the honeycomb of cells there. Bim sacrificed
his tobacco in the emergency. The flaky mass was poured into the
radiator with fresh water from a canteen; the stuff found the leak and,
swelling, stopped it.
Then on and on, around the flanks of the little hills and across wide
flats where the brush was scattered. Always Quelele was sure to keep
a height of land between the car and the Road of the Dead Men until
finally he brought his gas mustang to a stop on the crest of a lava
ridge and pointed back. Against the eastern horizon showed a crawling
inch-worm in the desert’s immensity--Urgo and the rurales. Below the
lava crest and near at hand was the objective of their detour, the
road that led to the Casa O’Donoju and those who must be warned.
It was after sunset when the little car hiccoughed up under the avenue
of palms. An hour later in the first dark of night a file of horsemen
quit the perfumed precincts of alfalfa fields behind the Casa O’Donoju.
At the head, driving a pack-mule, was El Doctor Coyote Belly, big
Quelele riding beside him. Behind were Benicia and Grant. Bim Bagley
was file closer. In scabbards at the saddle of each hung carbines.
El Doctor, the guide, set the course away from the Road of the Dead Men
which, passing through the Garden of Solitude, buries itself in the
Yuma Desert. His direction was south and west toward the Gulf and the
labyrinth of volcano craters on its hither shore called Pinacate.